HHS Issues Final Rule on Contraception Mandate

"Safe harbor" extended to Jan. 1, 2014.

Today, the Department of Health and Human Services released the final rulemaking on the contraception mandate and religious organizations.

Legal experts are sifting through more than 100 pages of rulemaking to see if there is any breakthrough on the dispute between the Obama administration and religious employers that object to the mandate on moral grounds. The Becket Fund's website that provides updates on legal challenges to the mandate by for-profit and nonprofit plaintiffs is here.

So far, today's news appears to offer only one limited reprieve that many anticated: The "safe harbor" deadline for compliance by religious employers that object to the mandate has been extended from Aug. 1, 2013, to Jan. 1, 2014.

"Unfortunately the final rule announced today is the same old, same old. As we said when the proposed rule was issued, this doesn’t solve the religious-conscience problem because it still makes our nonprofit clients the gatekeepers to abortion and provides no protection to religious businesses. The easy way to resolve this would have been to exempt sincere religious employers completely, as the Constitution requires. Instead, this issue will have to be decided in court.”

The final rule fails to fix the HHS employer mandate’s fundamental problems:
Nonprofit religious employers are still dragooned into acting as gatekeepers to abortion.
Self-insured religious groups must hire administrators that pay for abortifacients and contraceptives.
Religious business owners still have to provide abortion-inducing drugs or pay up to millions of dollars in fines.

Comments

You, in the United States, have never experienced having anyone’s religion imposed on you. You seem to think it is fair turnabout for the Christians to have someone else’s religion imposed on them, for a change; but you, a non-Christian, have never had Christianity imposed on you.

Let’s be clear: You have lived in a country surrounded by enough Christians (taking the serious and marginal ones together as a lump) to be aware that people of a religion other than yours surrounded you. But this awareness does not constitute an imposition.

An imposition would be something along these lines: Let us say that your religion morally obligated you to consider tattoos sinful…a sort of desecration of the human body, perhaps; and unhealthy and unsafe, too, so that it wasn’t merely a personal abstention but rather the kind of thing you were morally obligated to “raise awareness about.”

Or if that’s too far-fetched, imagine that you were a vegan.

Then, suppose that your government’s elected officials and bureaucracy consist largely of persons who either sneer at your faith/morality, plus a smattering of persons who publicly identify themselves as practitioners of it but clearly aren’t. Then, suppose this government passes a law stating that you must have a set of tattoos—or else, you must eat meat, if you went with veganism—in order to own a business (or to operate a school, charity, or medical facility) of more than 50 employees.

And then, suppose that, after you made a stink about how this was forcing you to violate your conscience, the government altered the regulation in this fashion: YOU don’t actually have to get the tattoo or eat meat. But you are required to buy vouchers for tattoos/meat, even though you never plan to use them. Also, you are denied permission to compensate your employees in dollars; you must give part of their compensation in the form of these tattoo/meat vouchers. Which are, by the way, non-transferrable. Oh, and let’s add that the tattoo industry and the meat-packing and processing industries were big financial supporters of the party in control of the government when the law is passed. And let’s add that tattoos and meat are both plentiful, available nearly everywhere, inexpensive, and largely unregulated…so there’s really no plausible argument that these draconian impositions are justified by some emergency dearth of either tattoos or meat.

So if you are a business owner, or a school/charity/orphanage/hospital operator, you must either reduce your employees to less-than-50, or sell your business/charity/school/whatever (probably at fire-sale prices) to an owner who does not practice your faith or share your moral objections. A profound transfer of property begins, with all practitioners of your faith (or people who share your moral concerns) being shoved out of academia, charity work, schooling, and business ownership in favor of everyone else. There is, in effect, now a “religious test” for business ownership, for involvement in healthcare, for involvement in a vast number of industries.

Sorry, Jerry; there has been no imposition of this kind on you in your lifetime. The Know Nothings ran on a platform which paralleled this kind of thing. But in recent memory? The peyote cases for Native American tribes are perhaps the closest thing, and they were decided in favor of religious liberty.

So your “how does it feel?” question rings hollow. If the Goldman-Sachs Admini…whoops, excuse me, I meant to say, the Planned Parenthood Adm…eh, uh, sorry, I mean to say, if the Obama Administration were ever to achieve all that it desires on behalf of its big donors, we Catholics will be able to tell you what it feels like to lose freedom of conscience. But while you might express sympathy, you would be unable to identify with our situation, having had no opportunity to experience it yourself.

If they ever single out your “functional religion” (read: whatever life philosophy, cosmology, ethical guidelines, and habits of do-gooding you may have which serve for you the purposes of a religion, for I am doing you the credit of assuming that you don’t live an utterly aimless and unexamined life) for heavy financial penalties, THEN you will be able to talk about the shoe being on the other foot. Until then, if you want to know “how it feels,” you will have to ask us.

Posted by James on Sunday, Jun 30, 2013 8:58 PM (EDT):

I think ole Jer has been listening to Dillon way too much!! Sorry for making you go to Mass on Sunday’s, Jer. It must have really been tough on you. But enjoy all those positive feelings ... since it’s obvious that “You can’t get no .... Satisfaction.”

See, we can do it too.

Posted by Andrew on Saturday, Jun 29, 2013 10:54 PM (EDT):

We all have to pray for Jerry here. Even in victory, the anger of the other side rages on. He is so misinformed. God grant him wisdom.

Posted by Jerry on Saturday, Jun 29, 2013 9:20 PM (EDT):

How does it feel? I mean, really, how does it feel? You people (meaning conservative Catholics and other religionists) insist that the civil law of a cecular nation must be under your mandate and control and say you have the “right” to do that. When other people try to impose the same upon you, you scream bloody murder and began to shriek about “religious liberty” (a liberty you want only for your religion an no other beliefs). For far too long, you ruled the roost. Now the shoe’s on the other foot and you’re getting that foot kicked up your patoot. How does it feel? Probably the same we the rest of us felt when you kept imposing your religion and beliefs upon us. It’s your turn to learn a lesson.

Posted by Sally on Friday, Jun 28, 2013 4:01 PM (EDT):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6zGEBhJMHA

Posted by Micheal Speyrer on Friday, Jun 28, 2013 3:27 PM (EDT):

The only solution is war until total victory is achieved, because make no doubt our enemies, as benign as they think themselves to be, are fighting one against us. The Catholic Church in the United States is on the cusp of a very long, and hard battle with those forces in the Federal Government, and society at large that mean to extinguish our way of life directly through the Courts, where indirect and subversive means have failed. Mark my words, it will take the combined effort, of every devout and sincere bishop and priest, religious and lay, parish and mission to beat these devils back. And beat them back we must, or sede our place at the table to those who mean to end us. The conflict we face is that serious and the times are that dire. Otherwise we must all grow content to share innocent blood on our own hands. This needs to be preached from the rooftops of every parish in this nation, the battle lines need to be clearly drawn, and the bastions need to be raised.

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About Joan Desmond

Joan Frawley Desmond, is the Register’s senior editor. She is an award-winning journalist widely published in Catholic, ecumenical and secular media. A graduate of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies of Marriage and Family, she lives with her family in Menlo Park, Ca, in the San Francisco Archdiocese.